Showing posts with label Labour leadership. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Labour leadership. Show all posts

Saturday, 9 May 2015

The Spine Podcast: Why Tristram Hunt should be the next Labour Leader

Well, this for me is a big decision. I've made a non-election podcast. I'll be making more and not all of them will be about politics. However, I'm still in a political frame of mind and today I wanted to argue why I think Tristram Hunt should be the next Labour leader. I know real Labour folk will disagree but real Labour folk are possibly the reason why they keep failing. Idealism gets in the way of common sense. Anyway, give it a listen and if you enjoy it, have any suggestions, or just want to give me encouragement to do more, please leave a comment or email me at thespineblog@gmail.com. I'm still not sure what I'm doing but I'm having fun doing it. [Apologies for the vulgar 'coke' joke at the beginning. Once written, I couldn't resist leaving it in.]

Friday, 14 November 2014

A Topical Ed Miliband Cartoon

New optimism this morning. Yesterday I installed a new plugin to this blog and it claims to track my RSS feed. I thought literally nobody picked up my feeds but now I see it's even more popular that reading the site through a browser. Oh, I know many of the hits are bots working for news aggregators. I also know that simply because my stuff appears in people's feed readers doesn't mean they actually read my words. But it feels oddly better being unread by thousands of people that being visited by just a few hundred.
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This morning I faced a mild dilemma. What do you do when SPAM isn't SPAM? The Chinese are clearly a clever people and are adapting their tactics. I've been hit by their SPAM for months and I've been able to delete it all without hesitation. This morning, however, I found this comment waiting for me:
Love your full scenery shot~!
Welcome visit me back http://ecinfant.blogspot.hk/

The problem is that it's not entirely SPAM. Whoever left it, looked at my post long enough to spot that I'd included a panorama shot of Sherdley Park in St Helens and, clearly, the people of Hong Kong trawl the web looking for panorama shot of Sherdley Park in St Helens... I'm not sure what I can do if the spammers start to read my blog. It's my nightmare scenario.
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As you can see, I don't have much time to write so I've quickly narrated last night's cartoon. It's eight minutes of my usual nasal waffle (I always sound like I have a cold, which is probably to be expected because I do always seem to have a cold). Today's brief rant is about UK politics and Nigel Farage and my difficulties with drawing Ed Miliband's face.